Alone I Made the Signs of My Way

Raili, have you ever looked in the mirror, when you sign? Pastor for the deaf Eino Savisaari asked me this question at my first sign language course in 1973.

remember

I remember if I do remember

at least I should be reminded to remember

otherwise I would not remember

it would be so good, if I remembered

what I should remember

but who is it to tell me that I should remember even that

when I hardly can remember

what I should remember

I would not mind otherwise, but it would be good

if I remembered why it was good to remember

but I just cannot remember

how it was when I remembered

all the important things to remember

in order to have remembrances to share

for others to remember

Author’s notes

Because I wrote my stories over a twelve-year period, between 2000 and 2012, some of them repeat events which have already been mentioned in previous stories. My Finnish memoirs received some criticism for this repetition. I have taken note of these repetitions in this English translation by mentioning them each time they occur. As my stories are their own entities and were originally intended to stand on their own this kind of repetition was partly necessary.

In some of my stories I have used capital letters to show that a deaf or deafblind person is signing that expression or that it is a gloss of sign language. This type of transcription of sign language has been used in sign language dictionary and research work in many countries because sign language as a visual language could not be written. From this way of noting the difference between sign languages and spoken languages, I have wanted to show that sign language has its own grammar and word order, but that, of course, the full richness of sign language is missing from this type of notation, since it fails to take account of all the facial expressions, the use of the hands to show, for instance, how big or how fast etc. something is, the way in which space is used too in relation to expressing where and when everything takes place. I do hope the readers of my book are aware, or will become aware, of how rich sign languages are in their ways of expression and that it is in no way my intention to suggest that the language of deaf and deafblind people is poorer than that of spoken languages.

Raili Ojala-Signell

Table of contents

Prologue

How I became me

Deaf world

Sounds in silence

Sounds – difficulties in being a hearing person

Dances at the Deaf Club

Wake-up the deaf way

Own best friend for many years

You have gained weight!

The VIP person in my life

Me and us

Ifs and buts

Ferry and mitten

Little brother

Going to school

Gone with the wave

Rotten tooth

Wild strawberries

An egg as payment

Wrong R

My parents’ story

My father Eero

Father’s daughter – daughter’s father

Shopping with Father

Deep coma

At the funeral parlour

A fall

Little-Risto

Deaf nanny

Dimness

It’s never too late

Bridge between two worlds

Sign language – mother tongue

Finnish – language of environment

Names of my life

Music and me

Dangerous telephone

Sack race champion

Sleep talker

One in a million

Good mouth

Passenger in fear

Deaf salad

Why always me?

New role

As a sign language interpreter

First interpreting assignment

An official delegate

Me in many

…and the name was?

I

You

He

Coffee & cognac

Cello concert

It stretches, but does not break

Astronomy lecture

In the spotlights

Partying with stars

Lost for words

The world will teach you for sure

A photo on the wall

Christmas alone

I have to

Once an information officer, always an information officer

Me and my many tasks

How I became a fighter?

It would be so useful

Crisis

Appointment with the teacher

Marriage no-noes for deaf people

A trip I will never forget

Visual radio and deaf people

Square root versus beetroot

I wish I could have been there – Milan 1880

Ideologies in war: the fight over deaf people

My career beside Liisa Kauppinen

Liisa – my friend, boss and the visionary of the deaf world

Work grows to be worldwide

Liisa continues working and receives awards

Epilogue

Prologue

I am not deaf, but not quite hearing either. I feel that both these worlds live happily and strongly in me. Of course I am also much else besides these elements, which makes me the Raili that I am. – This is how one could describe the stories of Raili Ojala-Signell on her experiences as a hearing child of deaf parents. Vivid mini short stories offer insightful flashes and door openings to a world that is not so well known: where she was born and where she has lived multi-dimensionally and colourfully all her life with her family, work, training, advocacy, and in her leisure activities. These stories include a strong positive suggestion and above all belief that ignorance and prejudice against deafness, sign language, and sign language culture can easily and surprisingly be made to vanish.

The stories, intriguingly, include insights, which change fluidly within one story and from one story to the next. Insights into a deaf, and a deaf blind individual, a hearing child of deaf parents, representatives of the hearing majority, and a worker in the field of deafness appear in the stories along with their experiences, often in a humorous way. These views make it easy for the reader to become absorbed in the situations, ambiences, and emotions in the stories. With their help the reader can also identify with the experiences and even with the identities depicted.

Regarding identity and difference of experience, it is interesting to note that the experiences of hearing children of deaf parents and of deaf children do not differ much in the end. As a deaf child of deaf parents it was easy for me to dive into the world of the writer and experience it, so that I did not think of the differences between our two groups at all. These differences are minimal after all, maybe more like shades of difference, although one would imagine that the world of sounds would be the most decisive area of difference. I was once in a while thrilled that I could, through these stories, return to scenery, situations, and people that I have not encountered since I was a child. Joy, happiness, grief, and sadness seized me in their turn, when I re-lived these stories.

The stories seem to have a certain basic structure, which at the end is condensed into some kind of solution, surprise, discovery, or clever explanation. But the end can also be left completely open to make the reader ponder more deeply; for instance, how things could have been totally otherwise. Some stories seem almost to be paintings or visual prints of a happening or a passing moment, which the reader can follow like a spectator of a short film in which they can submerge themselves.

Raili Ojala-Signell’s stories gently portray how deaf culture is much more than not hearing sounds or the so-called inability to hear, or that living as a deaf person might be only a very painful process in the path of life. These stories convey a whole way of life and its traditions, into which the writer has merged herself like any member of a linguistic and cultural group. For me, joyful and surprising were descriptions which were connected with sounds because they were so unbelievable and unimaginable as expressions from the world of deaf people I know.

The stories include positive life experiences as well as sad incidents, which are part of life, solemn experiences, prejudices, and people in doubt, all of which one can survive as a whole and stronger person. The deaf community offers the means for this survival, means born from the lives of people living in the community, which one can easily identify with. These are beautifully included in these stories.

Any person interested in deaf culture and sign language, or a professional who has long worked in the sign language field, can benefit from this book. I believe that this book also can be meaningful to the children of deaf parents and their families. For the families, these stories can bring light into the wide field of deafness and reveal the fact that the whole community is so very many-sided. The book is a welcome addition to the literature which is still scarce in this field, and also to the rich tradition of storytelling in the deaf community.

Markku Jokinen

Executive Director, the Finnish Association of the Deaf

President, the European Union for the Deaf

Honorary President of the World Federation of the Deaf

How I became me

I was not asked

if I wanted to

alternatives

were not given

born hearing

genes from my parents

ran in the family

deafness

a step not yet taken

words not yet uttered

but already producing

signs with my fat hands

relatives were sighing

grandmothers moaned

cannot be deaf, too

poor little one

hearing ears

open eyes

sharpness of two

the adult world demanded

a hearing person

wanted to talk

to my parents and

then I was needed

difficult words

adult matters

for a child to perceive

and convey

beautiful language

richness of expression

whole deaf culture

suckled from mother’s milk

interpreter mediating

thoughts, feelings

something even

left unsaid

impartial, objective

honest, exact

not taking

any sides

too much to ask

when feelings lie

always on the side

of the weaker

did I choose

to work in this field

or did I simply take

the road signed to me

two languages

two cultures

between two worlds

I have been a bridge

but what am I

not deaf

not completely hearing

will I stay as a bridge

I

Deaf world

Sounds in silence

I was born in a silent world. I have grown up and been raised in silence. In silence I have also carried out my life career. At least this is the generally prevailing understanding of the deaf world, which is considered to be a silent world. Spiritual work among deaf people still carries the title The Silent Congregation.

Because deaf people cannot, through hearing, control the level, nuance and clarity of the voice they produce, they cannot judge or estimate what kind of voice is appropriate for each situation. The majority of deaf people have never heard, and that is why they cannot even imagine what kinds of sounds all their actions produce as a side-effect. Thus, the deaf world where I grew up is far from being silent and soundless.

Our silent house, from the hearing people’s viewpoint, was unbelievably full of sounds my parents produced unintentionally and without even knowing that they produced them. My father reading his morning paper before leaving for work was pain to my hearing ears. Rustle and crackle – my father was turning the pages of Keskisuomalainen, our local morning paper when slurping his morning coffee in the kitchen. Opening the paper, turning the pages and finally folding it together could wake me up when I was sleeping in the living room around the corner. Or it was mother who woke me up when she had got up early to make coffee and pack lunch for father. She might have decided to do the dishes, which were left by the sink in the evening. The crashing of pots and lids, the clink of dishes and the running of water disturbed my sleep. Sometimes I had to get up, dash into the kitchen and just look at mother, who understood from one blink, if not totally to stop her morning work, at least to quieten down her clinking and banging.

For older deaf people, being a hearing person has even represented being clever and knowing it all. Through hearing, one has the possibility of fully participating, receiving and picking up information from the environment without any attempt and strain. How badly we hearing people have been using this gift of hearing! It was often very difficult for my parents to understand how we children could have the radio and TV on simply as background sound and did not listen to what was being said in the news. When my parents saw a photo or film in the news which interested them in what was for them a silent TV before captioning started, they wanted to know what had happened somewhere. It was difficult for them to understand that I could sit there in front of the TV without constantly picking up news of what was happening in the world. Very often it was impossible to interpret the news item for them because it had slipped by so fast. I should have been concentrating on listening in order to be able to convey the information.

My parents used their voices to talk to their hearing discussion partners. My mother’s voice was deaflike, but pleasantly clear so that even a stranger could understand it. My mother connected easily even with total strangers. My father’s speech was very difficult to understand and his voice was strong and even coarse. But that did not bother my father. He was not shy in speaking to total strangers. If this stranger did not understand right away what father was saying, he added more volume. If the matter was not clear even after that, my father used any and all other means to enliven the message.

My father was a great pantomime actor. He could gesticulate, move, and make facial expressions so vividly that his whole posture changed into this person whom he wanted to describe. If the facial expressions, gestures and pointing did not get the partner to understand, he took to drawing and writing to help out.

So my parents never had communication difficulties even with unknown hearing people who often had difficulties in understanding my father’s speech. Sometimes my father forgot and left his speech and voice accidentally on even when he was speaking to us children, when we could safely show him to turn the voice off, key-sign on the throat, in order to turn off the strong sound. This home sign could never be used with other deaf people, although their strong voice production often hurt my ears.

Most often deaf people do not have the faintest idea how much sound they produce while they are moving and doing something. At the get-together weekends of we hearing children of deaf parents, we had many good laughs, when imitating the unintentional sounds our own parents or deaf people we knew had produced. What groaning, sighing and panting is connected with bowing down, tying their shoe laces, putting their clothes on, when air is pushed out from their lungs due to that effort. This is also very typical of the only deaf amateur dancer in Finland whose jumps, movements, moving of hands and the effort of a dance movement are followed by panting, huffing, fizzling, whooshing and groaning.

And signing in itself is not always quiet. You can hear slapping, when a hand hits hard on bare skin. Clanging and clinking can also be produced by the buttons, laces and jewellery in clothing when they hit each other or the surface of the table.

When I was living at home, I often commented on the matters connected with sound production to my parents. Never did I dare to start a discussion on the sounds connected with love making and how much they scared and confused me as a child.

I am convinced that if I opened up my window at the moment, I could hear the humming of the wind in the branches of my backyard pine, singing of sparrows in the hedges and the metal hook hitting the top of the flagpole. Total silence might be an unknown concept to me.

Sounds – difficulties in being a hearing person

As I have grown up and worked among deaf people, I have daily seen what all deaf people are missing in this world of sounds dominated by we hearing people. Participation, access to information and interaction between people is mainly based on hearing and receiving and interpretation of all kinds of sounds. Words, sentences and the whole world of information flashes by the eyes of deaf people in the speed of lightning without them getting any grasp or clarity about it. Still nowadays, only a fraction of information, programmes and interaction between people is available for deaf people in a visual form, as a picture, text or sign language.

All of this I have myself both experienced and understood. Through my own work I have tried to improve the situation. But how to get deaf people to understand that hearing people do not have it all so well and easy either?

On a September weekend in 2001 I participated in the 50th anniversary conference of the WFD in Rome. I returned home from there all worn out and complaining about how difficult it is for we hearing people to live in a world full of sounds. I got to experience the hardship of being a hearing person even during the conference, as the mobile phones of the participants sitting in the audience kept ringing with every possible ringing tone or peep announcing the arrival of a text message. The deaf participants did not have a clue about this disturbance.

The music the orchestra played during the banquet dinner was really getting on my nerves. The music must have been intended to entertain the few hearing people as background music. Deaf people did not even know that music was being played, although the volume once in a while was wrecking the nerves of the hearing banquet guests. At other tables, lively discussions went on without problems in spite of this background music because the hearing people in those tables knew sign language. I had been stupid enough to volunteer as an interpreter in a table where there were four stone hearing people sitting with two deaf and two hearing people who were using sign language. It was impossible to try to hear what people were saying at the other end of the table during the saxophone solos. My throat started hurting, when I tried to interpret the lively discussion at our table. A couple of Italians were trying to convince the orchestra to reduce the volume a bit, without much success.

When the dances the deaf way actually began, the hearing people were in a hurry to leave the restaurant. The pounding of the basses and increased volume in order for the deaf people to feel the rhythm would have made our ears ring and heads ache.

In good company with good food and drink, the evening continued till the wee hours. We were in no hurry as it was possible to sleep late the next morning. The following day was Sunday. We had only self-directed sightseeing in Rome on the programme without a tight schedule. Or at least that was what my roommate Liz and I thought. It was past three o’clock in the morning when we finally fell asleep.

I woke up in the pitch dark hotel room to the nerve-wracking peeping sound of an alarm clock. How can anyone bear that kind of sound from one morning to another and wake up to the new day with a positive mind? The metallic ringing went straight into my nerve centre. Groaning and moaning started on Liz’ side of the room. With a fast movement she got the sound to stop. I checked the time on my mobile phone: 6.15! Liz had forgotten to turn the alarm off for this day after early mornings for interpreting. We went back to sleep.

Then an uneven, but heavy banging started in the hallway. Many participants were leaving in the early morning hours from the hotel. Some deaf person had overslept and had not come to breakfast as agreed with his mates. His travelling companion was pounding the door in despair with his fists. The doorbell was just a buzzer which was no use for deaf people. At some point the pounding stopped and silence fell into the hallway. Back to sleep I went.

Our hotel seemed to be quite a popular place for having conferences. Hotel guests streamed in and out every day. Under our hotel room window there was a construction site. On weekdays the workers had started their work at seven, but we had not paid much attention to that. We had to make it to breakfast before eight and the transportation bus to the Vatican right after that. Who could have guessed that in a Catholic country people would work also on Sundays? The clang of hammers, the loud talking of the working men and the clatter of wooden planks started to creep into our room through the open balcony door.

I must have fallen back into quite a deep sleep because it took a while before I realised that my mobile phone was ringing. I pulled out my earplugs, when answering the phone drowsily.

– Good morning, darling! Did you have a nice evening? my husband asks calling me from Järvenpää, waking me up at eight o’clock on a Sunday morning after the banquet.

I was whispering, when I replied and told him that Liz was still asleep and it was too early in the morning in Rome. Silence returned to the room.

At this point someone else would have given up, but I nestled my head back into my pillow and tried to get back to sleep. Hardly had my anger vanished, when a new sound attack was directed at the room. The telephone cried out next to my ear. I grabbed the receiver, which was giving me the free line sound. New ringing. Still no one on the line. Soon a rustling of keys could be heard at the door. I jumped out of my bed and dashed to the door. I almost got the door open, when the cleaning woman opened it first. She saw my angry face, apologised and slunk away fast. It was then that I realised that the doorbell was connected to the telephone. I must have expressed a few swear words when I reacted to this disturbance. Can a hotel guest not sleep later than eight in a hotel on a Sunday morning?

Hardly had I got back to my bed and between the sheets again, when a real morning concert started: all the church bells in the churches nearby began to peal, deep and devout. It was 8.30! Catholics were getting ready for their Sunday morning mass. I have always loved the soothing sound of church bells, but that morning the ringing was the last straw for me. I gave up and started dressing for breakfast.

During breakfast I tried to explain to the deaf people from different parts of the world who were sitting at my table how difficult it is to live as a hearing person in this world full of sound, where one cannot even get a good night’s sleep. They did not take me seriously. The sources of sounds are usually developed by hearing people to satisfy their own needs. Deaf people have for years expressed their wish to get all auditory information in a visual form.

Dances at the Deaf Club

I was a child of the small Säynätsalo Deaf Club. Säynätsalo town had grown around a plywood factory. Adolf Marttila was the first deaf carpenter engaged to work in the factory. He smoothed the way for other deaf people through his skills and conscientiousness. Little by little the deaf community in Säynätsalo started to grow. Every time there was a deaf friend or acquaintance around who needed work, a deaf factory worker took him to see his boss or to the factory office, and usually a job was offered. Later on, deaf people even from Jyväskylä, a nearby city some 20 kilometres away, worked in the Säynätsalo factory. Deaf workers were considered good workers because they did not take unnecessary breaks and dutifully fulfilled every task assigned to them. Usually the deaf workers had been placed in different units of the factory, so there was not much opportunity to stop and sign with a fellow deaf worker, only by passing them accidentally.

The Säynätsalo Deaf Club was founded after a row between some deaf people in Jyväskylä and after that the Säynätsalo deaf people did not want to join the activities of the Deaf Club in Jyväskylä. At its largest, there were some thirty members in this small Deaf Club. Besides the annual meeting, which was obligatory, the Deaf Club organised at least a Mothers’ Day Party and a Christmas Party. Once in a rare while an opportunity came up to have a visitor from the Deaf Association and that was when the enlightenment days or lectures were organised. During the summer picnics were organised on a camp site owned by the Säynätsalo Lutheran church.

There were not that many organised activities in the Deaf Club, but being a member of it was very important both for the deaf parents and their hearing children. We hearing children used to have the honour of presenting a signed song, poem or a play in the Deaf Club parties. But the best thing was to be together with the other hearing children, play together and run around the school corridors without anyone ever telling us not to be so loud. Our sounds did not disturb our deaf parents.

Usually at the end of every party with a planned programme, there was time for dancing. At that time, music and loud speakers were not known among deaf people. The dances were organised without music, they were silent dances. When the formal programme was over, all the tables and chairs were pushed aside. The person in charge of the programme blinked the lights a few times to get the attention of the participants. Standing on the stage he proudly presented the announcement that the first dancing piece would be a TANGO. Men circled around and asked the ladies for a dance. Tango was danced for some time without music but with the tango rhythm. The internal rhythm and familiar tango steps glided them along the dancing floor. That is, until the person in charge thought that it had been enough time for a tango. Lights were flashed and an announcement came that the next piece would be a WALTZ. This continued for the next hour and a half until it was time to say goodbye and go home.

The leave-taking rituals of